Is Tagcow the Future of Photo Recognition and Tagging?

Ok, now I have no idea exactly how this works and I’m still trying to figure it out, but this could be something very, very cool.

On Thursday I got an email from a company called Tagcow. Tagcow claims that they can automatically tag thousands of photos for you. They are using the Flickr API and are set up so that you can either upload photos to their own site or link your Flickr account up to their site where both descriptive and people tags can be added to your photos.

I tested the site out yesterday using my avatar and uploaded the photo to their site. The photo was tagged with man, Canon, camera and mirror. Very accurate descriptive tags of the photo.

So I decided to take the Flickr plunge yesterday and linked my flickrstream up to their site via the Flickr API authentication and have started to see tags coming back on my flickr photos.

Take the photo above. I tagged the above photo myself with the following tags: How Berkeley Can You Be Parade, How Berkeley Can You Be Parade 2007, How Berkeley Can You Be 2007, parade, car, art car, art, and Disney.

Now I have no idea if Tagcow is using some sort of Riya-like photo recognition software or if they simply have a bunch of people manually tagging away my Flickr photos in the background, but either way this seems really, really cool.

I’m not sure on the economics or business model of Tagcow but the application for a site like this in terms of image search seems pretty huge.

I’ll blog more on Tagcow after I understand a little more about how their technology works. This definitely may be a company worth watching.Update: More from TechCrunch here.

22 Comments

Thomas, my appreciation for the headsup on Twitter (where I follow you) about this — I’ve signed up and wish there was a way to get it working with *already-uploaded* photos, but I’ll keep an eye on this service too.

Perchance, do you know what the “Pole account for new images:” means? I presume it may be a typo of “Poll”?

The scariest part is their privacy policy which is indeed “TBD” per their site. Oh and the TBD “legal stuff”.

Aaron in my case I don’t care much about their privacy policy. All of the photos that I asked them to tag are public photos of mine on Flickr. 100% of my photos on Flickr are public. To this end I’ve already made the decision that these photos ought to be shared with the entire world and I wouldn’t necessarily expect any privacy from Tagcow with regards to these photos.

If I had private photos on the other hand I might not trust them to tagcow. Then again, if I had private photos I certainly wouldn’t be uploading them to Flickr as public photos either.

From the terms of service:“by posting, uploading, providing or submitting any Submission you are granting TagCow permission to use your Submission in any manner, including, without limitation, the license rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform,reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Submission; to publish your name in connection with your Submission; and the right to sublicense such rights to any third party.”

Is this a rights grab? Without paying for the service how is this company supposed to make money, especially considering they have to pay people to tag the photos?

I recently came across this article by David Pogue, and in turn this video on Human Computation that explains how Google gets people to tag millions of images for them, correctly and effectively, for free.

Incidentally, there’s a hilarious scene in that video starting at time = 20:30.

Followup: I ended up sending my whole Flickr stream of 10,000+ images through TagCow and it came out through the other end with what I’d term “pleasantly mixed results”. In some cases, the results were excellent, in some, awful, and in most… they were “OK. I blogged about it here:

“Now I have no idea if Tagcow is using some sort of Riya-like photo recognition software or if they simply have a bunch of people manually tagging away my Flickr photos in the background, but either way this seems really, really cool.”

— They have a bunch of people working on Mturk, they tag images for like $0.03.